Emma Honcharski is a classic multihyphenate: an artist, writer, event producer, and self-described “food person” whose time working in the service industry informs all of the above.

But perhaps her most significant descriptor is collaborator. “For me, it’s the only way things can happen,” Honcharski tells Pittsburgh City Paper. “I love facilitating other people’s [art and writing] practices, reaching other people. It’s really important and meaningful to me.”

Collaboration is at the center of the Pittsburgh Art Book Fair (PABF), which Honcharski co-directs with artists Mary Tremonte and Jacquelyn Johnson. The free, two-day event at the Carnegie Museum of Art invites art lovers, book enthusiasts, and community members alike to browse all forms of “printed matter,” ranging from eye-catching artist books and risograph prints to zines, photography, and small literary publications. The fair’s vendors (whose materials stay affordably priced at $35 or less) hail from as close by as Craig Street in Oakland and as far away as the Netherlands, Brazil, and South Korea.

Since its inception, the Art Book Fair has grown, and the third annual event in September drew more than 3,000 people, expanding from 65 to 95 exhibitors and into the upper level of CMOA’s Hall of Sculpture. In 2026, PABF will go even bigger and coincide with the 59th Carnegie International, the curators of which aim to broaden its reach and feature more collaborative projects.

“I think it’s really valuable to bring artists from everywhere into the mix in our arts community in Pittsburgh,” Honcharski says. “It gets to be such an upswell of creativity for everyone who’s either participating or attending.”

Honcharski remembers her world opening up after attending Printed Matter’s NY Art Book Fair as a teenager and “avid reader and writer,” traveling to the city from upstate Ossining, N.Y.

“I was like, I’ve never seen anything like this… books don’t have to look a certain way. Publishers don’t have to look or exist in a certain way,” she says. “The world of small presses is so robust and beautiful; all the different ways that people are making publications is so broad.”

In a year dominated by discourse around AI, the success of PABF shows that there is no substitute for handmade art and literature.

“I really value the labor that goes into bookmaking, whether someone has hand-bound a book, or has screen-printed it themselves, or they’ve spent time working on a piece of writing. That can’t be recreated by artificial intelligence,” Honcharski says. “That’s coming from the heart, coming from the mind, coming from the body. And I think it’s so important to really remain in touch with other people about that.”

While perusing the printed materials is meant to be fun and inspiring, art book fairs are also about connection, says Honcharski, bringing people together in a physical space.

“You can literally pick up [a book] and look at it at the fair, and you can talk to the person on the other side of the table who either made it or knows the people who made it,” she says.

Some of Honcharski’s myriad projects arose from connections she made at the Art Book Fair — recently, editing a volume of Queer Earth Food, a spiral-bound anthology by Clare Lagomarsino featuring written pieces that “touch all three topics.” Honcharski met Lagomarsino, a publisher and graphic designer, when she exhibited at PABF.

“Being an organizer of the fair … and as artists, as facilitators, writers, photographers, there are all these ripple effects of, we make something, we put it in the world, [which is] very vulnerable oftentimes,” she says. “[But then] it gets to touch so many people and perhaps make them a little bit more open to making something else of their own.”